Yesterday I received a direct message on Instagram from Maria. She said she hoped I didn’t mind her writing to me out of the blue, but that she was reading my book, and she wondered if she could have my email address to send me some reflections.

This morning, I read her email. I’m publishing her words here, with her permission, because I think she has beautifully and powerfully articulated the power of language and “how we are currently getting it so, so wrong”.

This is why I write. This is why language matters.

---

Dear Bryony

I’m writing because I wanted to tell you how brilliant, insightful and moving I think your book is. I haven’t quite finished reading it, but there is something on almost every page that makes me laugh, nod enthusiastically in agreement or sob uncontrollably.

I’m not a social worker or a social care ‘professional’. I’m a teacher, and I work with people who are seeking asylum in the UK, people who are refugees, and people who have migrated to the UK from other countries. A lot of my work is about celebrating the personalities, cultures and identities of people who have been consistently dehumanised by politicians, the media, and ‘services’.

However, my awareness of the importance of language in social care comes from my personal experience of finding myself in the unenviable position of being a ‘service user’, ‘client’, ‘carer’, member of a ‘vulnerable family’ etc. etc. etc.

My husband and I adopted two children from local authority care eight years ago. They are amazing, incredible human beings who have taught me so, so many things, and changed me for the better. However, the challenges of their early trauma (in itself exacerbated by massive, chronic failures in social care interactions with their original family) and their neurodiversity (made harder for all of us by a system that insists on diagnosing, measuring and categorising children and young people instead of asking them and their parents/important adults what they want, need and hope for) have been immense.

I often tell people that dealing compassionately and calmly with the distressed behaviour of my children isn’t the difficult part of being an adoptive parent. The truly difficult part is having to grapple – on a daily basis – with the fragmented, broken, labyrinthine, Kafkaesque tapestry of overlapping ‘services’ which ostensibly exist to ‘support’ children with ‘additional needs’. It is distressing, confusing and demoralising. It takes up far, far too much of my time and places indescribable financial, emotional and logistical pressure on my family.

The language that social care workers, health professionals and people within the education system use to talk about my children and my family is (as you articulate so beautifully and honestly in your book) dehumanising. It creates an ‘us’ and a ‘them’, and somehow justifies their repeated, catastrophic failure to support my family, and other families like mine. After all, my children are ‘vulnerable, complex cases’, ‘P-LACS/ex-CICs’ with ‘extremely challenging behaviour’, ‘spiky profiles’, ‘multiple diagnoses’, ‘poor genetic inheritance’ and ‘significant barriers to learning and accessing the community’.  Again and again, I have been sent the message – both explicitly and implicitly – that they are beyond help, that they are a drain on valuable resources, and that it doesn’t really matter what happens to them anyway. Because they belong to some other, ‘hard to reach’ group who aren’t like the rest of us.

This language is ubiquitous and insidious. In the early days of my ongoing war with ‘services’, I started using it myself because – in order to obtain the support we needed – I felt I needed to show the ‘professionals’ that I was smart enough to understand their language and to learn all their acronyms. I read all the books, learned all the terminology and tried to be ‘more professional than the professionals.’ It breaks my heart to this day that I described my children, in meeting after meeting, as being ‘vulnerable’, ‘extremely complex’, ‘hard to reach’ components of a local authority ‘caseload’. I  felt that I was being blamed for their struggles and found myself endlessly ‘engaging’ with ‘support’ that I knew wouldn’t help us because I feared being penalised and judged as ‘difficult’, ‘anxious’, and ‘overemotional’.

At one point I broke down in an emergency Education, Health, and Care Plan (EHCP) review meeting for my youngest child. Over the course of this meeting, the assembled ‘professionals’:  a) repeatedly called my child by the wrong name while simultaneously stating that they all ‘wanted the best for him’ and b) repeatedly referred to me as ‘mum’. I shouted, red-faced and tearful: ‘I’m not your mum! Most of you are old enough to be my parents! My name is Maria. It’s literally written under my face on this Zoom call! My family and I are actual humans with names! Learn them!’

I still feel, a lot of the time, that I am working to remind ‘professionals’ that my children are humans. I shouldn’t have to do this. On one particularly desperate day I sat in reception with my (then 6-year-old) child at Local Authority HQ and refused to leave until his ‘caseworker’ came down to meet him, so that he could see that he was a real child and not just a (misspelt) name on a waiting list.

Your book articulates why the language we use is crucial, and explains beautifully why and how we are currently getting it so, so wrong. So many people and families who need help are trapped in what amounts to an abusive relationship with local and national ‘support services’. They are measured, assessed, judged and dehumanised instead of being listened to and cared about. The stark, honest portrayal of this situation in your book makes me feel unbearably sad. But it also gives me hope that we can find a better, kinder way of doing things, and that our future actions can be grounded in – and underpinned by – our collective humanity, connectedness and desire to make things better for each other. Thank you for making the case for love, belonging, hope, trust and joy in social work.

Apologies for the extremely long email – it started off as a brief Instagram message, but then there was too much to say!

Huge thanks again for your writing and your work. Please keep on doing what you are doing – it’s so important!

Maria